by David Mack
Lying on a sheet of grated steel above a drainage well, atop a broad pedestal that hid the examination table’s extensive plumbing, was the corpse of Esperanza Piñiero.
As the light diffused and diminished in brightness, Crusher’s eyes adjusted, and she studied the naked cadaver’s copious injuries. “Can you open her eyes for me, please?”
Landar gently pried open the lids, giving Crusher and Oszor a look at the bloodshot corneas underneath. “Severe petechial hemorrhaging,” Oszor noted.
“And ligature marks around the throat,” Crusher said. “Can we have a scan of the trachea, please?”
The Orion powered up the table’s built-in imaging sensors, which superimposed a holographic model of Piñiero’s corpse over the real thing. Manipulating the hologram with balletic waves of his hands, Landar lifted the detailed imagery of her throat and neck into midair between himself and Crusher and Oszor. Spreading his hands, he enlarged the three-dimensional graphic. “It’s been crushed.” He pointed at the spinal column. “Whoever choked her applied enough pressure to snap C3 and C4.”
Oszor leaned close and studied the rest of the corpse. “I see no other signs of trauma.” He looked up at Landar. “Any internal injuries within the torso?”
Landar generated another scan and raised it up for study. Rolling the hologram over and turning it around, he made a swift review of Piñiero’s vital anatomy. “No ruptured tissue, no broken bones. No sign of blunt-force trauma.” He shrugged at Crusher and Oszor. “So far, I’d say cause of death looks like asphyxiation due to strangulation.”
“Did you run a tox screen?” Crusher asked.
He scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah, but we didn’t get much. Traces of moderate alcohol consumption, standard beta blockers, and cholesterol-reduction meds.”
The Gorn physician tenderly lifted Piñiero’s right arm, studied its underside, then laid it back down before repeating the process with the left arm. “No defensive wounds on the arms. Her attacker had a grip on her throat before she knew what was happening.”
Crusher bent down and eyed the dead woman’s hands. “Doctor Landar, did you take any scrapings from under her fingernails?”
“Not yet.” He handed her a slender, delicate-looking tool with a round-edged spoon tip. “Be my guest.” Crusher took the implement and smiled at the young man.
Working with slow precision and a feather touch, Crusher retrieved several bits of soft matter from beneath each of Piñiero’s fingernails. Each small mass was catalogued separately, along with a notation designating from which finger it had been recovered.
When she had finished, she handed the tray of sealed samples to Landar. “How soon can we have these analyzed?”
“A few seconds.” He pointed over his shoulder. “The electron chromatograph’s right over there. Hang on while I put these through.” The coroner stepped away.
Oszor asked Crusher in a low rasp, “What do you expect to find?”
She couldn’t tell him that she expected to find trace particles of bioplast sheeting because the Enterprise crew suspected a Soong-type android had been involved in the attack at the arboretum, or that the fugitive chairman was very likely also an android.
“I don’t know,” she lied. “Maybe skin or blood residue if she was able to scratch her attacker before she died. All it would take is a few cells to point us at a suspect.”
The Gorn didn’t respond to that speculation. Instead, he accessed the exam table’s systems and ran some new tests, studying everything from the breakdown of brain cells and muscle tissues to the body’s general lividity and the progress of rigor mortis.
Landar returned, holding an Orion data device similar to a padd. “All right, sorry to be the bearer of weird news, but your gal here didn’t have any biological residue under those nails except her own. What she did have was trace particles of bioplast sheeting.” He handed the tablet to Crusher. “I guess your prime suspect’s a mannequin.”
Oszor stared up at his test results, and his irises dilated. “This woman did not perpetrate the attack on the rooftop.” He highlighted several lines of data. “The levels of lactic acid present in her muscle tissues are inconsistent with the general rate of observed cell breakdown. Also, two of the medications in her system were administered by a timed-release implant. Those drugs continue absorbing into tissues postmortem, but based on the timing of her implant, too much of the drug has been absorbed.” He looked at Crusher. “This woman has been dead for at least six hours, well before the incident on the rooftop. But someone placed her in stasis to fool us into thinking she had been dead for less than two hours.” To the Orion coroner, he added, “I think Esperanza Piñiero was murdered so that she could be framed for the assassination.”
The accusation made Landar back up half a step and raise his hands. “Hey, sure. You’ll get no argument from me. But if I could make one little suggestion?” He waited until Oszor and Crusher both motioned for him to go on. “Before you go and start spinning conspiracy theories, you might want to have an answer to this question: Framed by who?”
That, Crusher had to admit, was indeed the question.
17
Misery was everywhere, cloaked in stench. Šmrhová materialized from the transporter beam in the heart of a slum district inside Orion’s capital, drew her first breath of local air, and gagged on it. The street was an open sewer, a fetid river of urine and waste water littered with garbage. Decaying buildings, some without doors on their entryways, squatted on either side of the narrow road, packed together like filthy giants crouching shoulder to shoulder in the dark.
No matter how many times Šmrhová witnessed the reality of poverty, she remained boggled by the fact of its continued existence in cultures that possessed the ability to eradicate it—but not the will. The Orions, it seemed, were one such culture. Opportunistic and cutthroat, they had little compassion for those of their kind who failed to thrive, no matter the reason. Born into disadvantage and squalor? Too bad, said the plutocrats who controlled the levers of government and the engines of industry. Though the practice of sentient trafficking had moved largely underground, it was an open secret that the Orions remained involved in the slave trade, not only of aliens but their own kind, as well. To them, it was merely a fact of life, as routine as smuggling, black market weapons, and fraud.
Or, as the Orions like to call it, personal liberty. Šmrhová tried to mask her contempt; after all, tolerance of alien viewpoints was one of the cherished values of the Federation. But confronted by an ethos that glorified individual selfishness at the expense of society, which let a select few reign as oligarchs over a permanent underclass that was brainwashed to adore them for it, she was tempted to rebel against Starfleet’s open-minded policy of noninterference and start leveling the Orions’ economic playing fields, one dead robber baron at a time.
A man called out, “In here, Lieutenant.” She turned to see an Orion police officer in the doorway at the top of a short flight of steps. He beckoned her. “Your shipmates are inside.”
She climbed the stairs and sidestepped past the cop. “Where’s your vehicle?”
“On the roof. It’s not safe to leave them unattended in the street.”
“Yeah, that’s encouraging.” She followed him through the demolished interior of what appeared to have been, in better times, a multi-unit apartment building. Walls had collapsed or been smashed down, there were holes in the rotted floors, and exposed plumbing and wiring were visible everywhere. Odors of stale urine and a skunk-like funk that she had learned to associate with smoked narcotics permeated every room; it was the stink of failure.
The cop led her to an open door and a staircase leading down to the basement. “They’re down there with our lab techs and a few of the Gorn.”
“Thanks.” She passed him and descended the rickety, creaking stairs. Harsh white light flooded the basement, but judging from the dank and moldy quality of the air, Šmrhová guessed the underground space spent most of its time
shrouded in darkness. Moisture obviously had sneaked in through prominent cracks in the concrete walls and floor, and cobwebs stretched like cloud cover between the half-rotted wooden joists close overhead.
Worf and La Forge stood in the center of the long room. Opposite them were two Gorn from the Imperial Guard. The four of them seemed to be the only ones actually doing anything useful. The half-dozen Orion police milling about all sported the same weary look that made Šmrhová suspect they had long since stopped even pretending to give a damn about their jobs.
Joining her shipmates, she looked down at the empty space on the floor between them and the Gorn. “I presume this is where Piñiero’s body was found.”
“Correct,” Worf said.
She looked up and around, squinting against the glare from the portable floodlights. “No windows. Only one way down, with not much reason to come here. And I don’t mean to speak ill of Orion’s Finest over there, but . . . I get the impression they don’t patrol this neighborhood very often. So how, exactly, did they find Piñiero’s body all the way down here?”
“Anonymous tip,” La Forge said. “Or so they say.”
The security chief folded her arms and pondered the alleged sequence of events. “Who would come down here? Thieves? There’s nothing here worth taking. Someone looking to get rid of a body of their own? Why would they call in a tip to the police?” Unanswered questions and improbable scenarios nagged at her. “This isn’t adding up for me.”
“Maybe this’ll change the equation a bit.” La Forge showed her the readout of his tricorder. “We’re picking up fresh traces of thorium. They make a path through the building.” The engineer nodded toward Worf, then the Gorn. “We found the first traces down here. Hazizaar confirmed the reading and followed the trail to the roof.”
Šmrhová took hold of the tricorder and paged through the scans La Forge had made. “So, you’re thinking whoever dumped Piñiero’s body tracked it in.”
“Exactly.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not much, but it’s the best lead we have.”
Worf added, “It is the only lead we have. But we mean to make the most of it.” He tapped his combadge. “Worf to Enterprise.”
Chen answered, “Enterprise. Go ahead, Commander.”
“Have you found any leads on the source of the thorium we detected?”
“We’ve been comparing sensor data with the Hastur-zolis. I think they’ve got something, on the far side of the planet: an abandoned thorium breeder reactor. Signature impurities in the samples you sent are a perfect match for the isotopes at the reactor plant.”
Šmrhová interjected, “We need to secure that power plant.”
“Already done, sir.” Chen sounded pleased with herself. “Armed security forces from the Enterprise and the Hastur-zolis have taken control of the plant pending formal action by the Orion Colonial Police.” Her good mood faded abruptly. “Unfortunately, we found no one there, and no sign that it’s been used as any kind of a base of operations.”
La Forge, who had been listening intently, spoke up. “Chen, we need you to make a full sensor sweep of the planet’s surface, looking for any other traces of that same isotope.”
“Ahead of you again, sir. Elfiki’s running the sweep now, and the Hastur-zolis is scanning the opposite hemisphere to save us time. We’ve ruled out a number—Hang on.” The comm channel went quiet for a few seconds, then Chen returned, her voice aquiver with nervous excitement. “Sirs? Are you all ready for transport?”
Worf’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
“Because we have a lock on a thorium trace inside the capital—and it’s moving. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think we’ve found our suspect.”
Without delay, Worf snapped, “Three to transport! Energize!”
• • •
It was a wall of bodies, a slow and shuffling mass of humanoids twenty people wide stretching for blocks, and no matter how aggressively La Forge shouldered through them, he felt as if he were pushing against the ocean, struggling to get ahead of the current.
He thought he heard Worf’s voice over his combadge, but the street noise was overwhelming. Hovercar traffic zoomed past high overhead, the humming of their magnetic drives rising and falling, working definitions of the Doppler effect. Advertisements in the garish, neon-lit storefront windows of the capital’s Center City district blared trite slogans and music that was blatantly manipulative and designed to haunt the memory. La Forge cringed and fought to ignore them—which only made him all the more aware of them, and drove the infectious melodies into his brain. Thousands of walking feet would have filled the night with the close thunder of footfalls under the best of conditions, but on the rain-slicked pavement, each step resounded with a wet slap of contact, so that the throng carried the patter of rain with them.
Chen’s voice squawked from his combadge and pierced the gray noise of the street. “Enterprise to La Forge! Do you see the suspect?”
“Not yet.” He adjusted his cybernetic eyes’ sensitivity to alpha-particle emissions specific to the wavelength of thorium-229. His ability to perceive the telltale isotope had been Worf’s reason for putting him on point as they sought to identify and capture the suspect. But either by chance or by design, their quarry had taken refuge among the masses, using their sheer numbers as a shield. He grew frustrated. “Enterprise, how close am I?”
The first reply was lost in the clamor of voices and a banshee wail set to power chords promoting some new holosuite thriller program. La Forge covered his right ear and shouted, “Say again, Enterprise!” He listened closely, his uncovered left ear turned toward his combadge.
“About five-point-one meters, bearing zero-zero-six off your present heading.”
Eyes locked in the direction Chen had indicated, La Forge slalomed through the crowd, mumbling “sorry” and “excuse me” over and over as he hip-checked one person after another out of his path. Two huge aliens of a species he had never seen before refused to be parted, forcing him to detour wide around them. As he cut in front of the pair, he collided with another person.
She looked up at him from within the deep cowl that had hidden her face.
It was the doppelgänger of Esperanza Piñiero. The duplicate of the dead chief of staff was perfect in every detail save the cosmetic damage wrought by Wexler’s phaser to the bioplast sheeting on her throat. La Forge looked her over in a glance and saw thorium-229 alpha particles escaping from radioactive smears on her shoes.
Then he saw red, a split second before he doubled over from the pain of being punched in the face, gut, and groin, all in the span of a second. Winded and nauseated, he swatted his combadge. “La Forge to away team! She’s running! And she still looks like Piñiero!”
Rapid chatter filled the channel, but over the shouts and alarums spreading through the crowd, La Forge couldn’t tell what any of his shipmates was saying. He forced himself into motion, following the path of least resistance—the swath the escaping android had cut through the knots of aimlessly drifting pedestrians moving between the theater district and the row of tourist hotels lining the city’s central traffic artery.
In the spreading tumult, he heard disruptor fire, followed by screaming. Moments later he hurdled over fallen civilians, some wounded, some dead, all unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire between the android and the Gorn imperial guard she had killed.
More noise from his combadge. He caught only the end of Chen’s update. “—bearing zero-seven-two off your current heading!” Turning to his right, he saw the main entrance to a towering, ultramodern tourist hotel, the Sahalax Grand Oasis. More than a dozen people had been knocked to the ground near the fountain in front of the luxury tower, and the hotel’s doormen and bellhops were scrambling to provide assistance. Looks like our suspect’s handiwork.
Disregarding propriety or risk, La Forge barreled through the gawkers and rubberneckers between himself and the hotel’s entrance. He looked left and right, then struggled to see through the d
ark smoked-glass windows into the lobby. “Enterprise, is she in the hotel? I don’t see her.”
“Same bearing, but range is opening fast. She’s gaining altitude!”
Altitude? La Forge looked up.
Built into the glass-paneled façade of the hotel were a half-dozen glass-walled elevator pods, conveyances for those who loved scenic views of the capital’s stunning cityscape. Two were stationary, two were descending, and two were ascending. He focused on the closer of the two climbing pods and increased his eyes’ magnification to five times normal.
The doppelgänger was inside the pod. She looked down at him, teased him with a smirk, and waved with a coy waggling of her fingers.
La Forge drew his phaser from under his jacket, aimed, and fired.
His weapon’s brilliant vermillion beam struck the bottom of the elevator pod. A fiery blast erupted from the point of impact, and the lower half of the pod disintegrated.
The android started to fall, then she caught a handrail inside the lift pod.
He fired again, and this time the beam slammed into the android’s gut. Light flared as she was knocked loose, and then she fell, tumbling out of control as she plummeted to the street.
Civilians screamed and scattered as the android’s body fell. Several dozen meters above the ground, she bounced off a protruding portion of the hotel’s sign. Her scorched, limp form cartwheeled erratically into the fountain outside the hotel’s entrance. The water in the fountain was far too shallow to offer any kind of cushion, and the body landed with a loud splash, a sickening thud, and an ear-splitting crack.
La Forge saw that he had become the focal point for a couple of hundred bystanders, all of whom watched fearfully to see what he would do next. He tucked his phaser under his jacket and hurried to check on the fallen android. As he leaned over the edge of the fountain to get a better look at the body, a crimson flash of light behind its eyes was accompanied by a muffled pop of detonation. Then black wisps of smoke snaked out of the stricken android’s ears, nostrils, and slack mouth. He frowned; he recognized when someone was covering their tracks.